The Times’s Motherlode blog just ran an item about a woman in Florida who tweeted about the death of her 2-year-old boy.
Here’s a recount of the events to give an idea of the scale of this thing:
Two-year-old Bryson Ross drowned on Monday in the swimming pool of the home his family had just moved into in Merritt Island, Fla.
Shellie Ross, Bryson’s mother, is a popular blogger, who chronicles her life as a mother of four, and the wife of an Air Force sergeant, and whose Twitter account, @Military_Mom, has more than 5,400 followers.
She tweeted those followers at 5:22 p.m. Monday, with a breezy update about the fog rolling in and spooking the chickens as she worked in her chicken coop. Sixteen minutes later, a 911 call was placed from her home saying that Bryson was lying at the bottom of the pool. At 6:12 p.m. she tweeted again: “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.” And five hours later, she wrote that she was “remembering my million dollar baby,” posting photos of the little boy.
Whoa. Granted, this is a woman who’s just lost her baby (her “million dollar baby,” in fact) and grief does some funny things to people. But still, I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around it.
Just think of the logistics. First, your son has fallen in the pool. Presumably, EMTs are already there, as you wouldn’t leave the boy unattended at that point. Your first move is to tweet? Then later, your child has been dead for five hours. He drowned. How is it that you are in a position to tweet? Where do you get the lucidity to write something? Why aren’t you with the boy’s father or your family? Don’t you have to face the details, like arranging a funeral or, I don’t know, weeping uncontrollably?
Let me be clear, I’m not angered or scandalized by what she did. I just can’t understand it. She must have been in a dissociative trance, her fingers working the keys like an automaton. Right? It must be that. I won’t make the standard “the Internet is ruling/ruining our lives” move. I refuse.
But whoa.
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